Fish Fear Me

I'd Pay $5/month...

...except for the fact that for a non-New Yorker like me, the product that matters sucks:

 July 9 (Bloomberg) -- New York Times Co. said in a survey of print subscribers that it’s considering a $5 monthly fee for access to its namesake newspaper’s Web site.

Times Co. also asked whether subscribers would be willing to pay a discounted fee of $2.50 a month for access to the site, in the poll confirmed today by Catherine Mathis, a company spokeswoman. Nytimes.com, the most visited among newspapers’ sites, is currently free.

Times Co. is contemplating additional sources of revenue as marketers slow spending on the Internet. Ad sales at the publisher’s sites, also including about.com and boston.com, fell 8 percent and 3.5 percent in the first quarter and fourth quarter of 2008 respectively. They gained 6.5 percent last year.

The New York Times could be the standard for excellence and objectivity in reporting, particularly on national news and international news that concerns America. Unfortunately, they are neither excellent nor objective in those areas. Sure, sometimes they pop out some good stories and not all of the reporters there are complete hacks. Overall though, and over time, reading the Times will leave a person dumber than when he started.

The problem is not that what they print is factually incorrect, usually, but in the natural filtering that news organizations do for their readers. I expect a newspaper to filter the news they present and to provide a reasonably complete synopsis of events. That is the value that they can provide to readers these days. I don't want to read thirty pages of transcript or watch thirty minutes of video to see what some politician or general said. The problem with the Times and news organizations in general, is that they have moved far away from objectivity in performing that service and have shot their credibility, at least with me. I've seen way too many times over the last few years, as the internet has allowed more and more access to source documents that I can read for myself, that the Times and others have been at best inaccurate and at worst dishonest in their coverage.

There are lots of factors hitting newspapers in the pocketbook these days. For me the issue is quality. I won't be subscribing to the Times online unless they actually deliver the product that they advertise, and then I think I would. I'd pay $5 or maybe even $10 per month for a quality news service online. Too bad the Times isn't one.

My Two Cents

What to do about the economy?

With unemployment already at 9.5 percent and likely to exceed 10 percent, much higher than White House officials predicted back in February, Mr. Obama has been facing attacks that his $787 billion stimulus program was either too timid or wrong-headed or both. Now, just five months after Congress agreed on the plan, with only a fraction of the money actually out the door, Washington is debating the need for a second round of stimulus amid economic and political crosscurrents.

I don't think an additional stimulus program is going to help. A lot of people are hunkered down right now and my feeling on why that is, based on what I've read and occasional discussions I've had with people, is that Obama's aggressive agenda is a big factor. Look at what is on the table right now:

Because its efforts have been broken into separate initiatives with different justifications, few people other than news junkies have noticed how extraordinary Barack Obama's agenda is. Perhaps a number will help: 35%. That is the aggregate percentage of United States GDP produced by the three industries that the Democrats hope to restructure from the top down: Health care (17% of GDP), energy (9.8% of GDP), and financial services (8% of GDP). Think about that.

Businesses large and small are scared to death of doing anything until they know how those things are going to shake out and how badly they may get hit with increased costs, mandates, and taxes. Then there are the enormous federal deficits and the possible consequences down the road from them.

The economy may have been able to handle debate on one of those issues this year, but not all three at the same time. It's just too much, regardless of what particular policies we are talking about. I think it's understandable that people are reluctant to hire or invest until they have a better handle on what the ground rules will be going forward. And depending on how those issues are resolved, many may not be in a position to hire until they have figured out how, or even if, they can absorb the increased costs that are almost a certainty.

Welcome to the Obama economy. 

Tuesday Notes

Mom is slated to get back to her house on Saturday now. I'm not entirely happy with how a few things have gone at the transitional care place, but I'll just be happy that she has progressed enough to get sprung in a few days. I know that she was in the best spirits in a long time today and more normal in strength and lucidity now that they are stepping her down from the narcotics.

The Twins begin a big series tonight at home against the Yankees. The Yankees have been hotter than the Twins lately and so I'll make no predictions here. The Twins got swept in four games at the new Yankee Stadium back in May. They lost four games by a total of five runs and three of them were 9th inning or later walk-offs by the Evil Empire. It was brutal. Both teams were struggling going into the series, but the Yankees emerged as the team that had gotten its act together. Now it's time to see if the Twins can do the same.

Robert S. McNamara passed away yesterday. I'm glad that I didn't do the post that first sprung to mind yesterday, me in my foul mood from getting bullshitted at mom's care conference. I'll wait until the man is buried before I say anything else, but I see shades of that "Best and Brightest" hubris at work today.

It occurred to me today that it has been remarkably quiet on the Brett Favre front. I know I've been distracted lately, but did I miss something big? It's quiet out there...too quiet.

I have lots of thoughts about our political culture and discourse these days. I can't seem to find a way to write them down without being angry. I had hoped that the election of Obama would have eased some of the vitriol and profound lack of integrity from some of the louder voices on the left, but that's not the case. Were those tactics that have become habit, or are they just showing what they have always been?

So, is it safe to watch the news now?

Weekend Update

I was going to go up north on Friday last week, but Sammy the Wonder Dog put a kink in my plans, starting Thursday night when she couldn't keep her dinner down. She didn't eat any food on Friday or on Saturday morning, though she was drinking water. I decided to stick at home until whatever was bothering her had passed or I knew what was going on. Long story short, passed was the operative word on Saturday. As in a mostly, but not entirely, intact little packet of peppers. You know the kind, what you get to shake on a pizza. A pizza like the one I got on Wednesday night. I didn't use those peppers and the packet must have fallen off the side of my desk when I ate the pizza. I'm guessing it had some sauce or grease on it and Sammy wolfed it down. Anyway, she appears to be ok today and ate her food this morning, and kept it down. This was not her first experience along these lines. At this stage, I just shake my head.

It was a nice Twins win today against the Tigers, 6-2. Nick Blackburn pitched his third complete game in his last four starts and is looking like the solid inning-chewing starter I had hoped he would be this year. The Twins overall have stepped it up a notch in the last month and have gone 7-3 over their last ten games, and won seven of their last eight series including five that were on the road. Starting on Tuesday, the Twins have three against the Yankees and three against the White Sox at home. After the All-Star break they go to Texas, Oakland, and get four at the Angels. They are only two games behind Detroit after today, and I think those next five series are going to make or break them as far as contending for the rest of the season. They can play with any of those teams right now, even the Yankees, if they play the solid ball I know they are capable of playing. 12-4 is probably too much to ask, but if they only manage 8-8 or worse, I think they are likely toast for this season. Even if they are only a handful of games behind, I think it will mean they just aren't going to gel into the team that they need to be to make the playoffs, or compete even if they do.

The obligatory weekly garden photo, whether you want it or not:

The radishes, onions, tomatoes, and peppers from the first planting are doing well. The beans are also, except for the ones the bunnies chowed on. They hammered the corn and carrots this week also. On the plus side, everything is emerging from the second planting last week. I think I'm going to start on a permanent fence solution this week. I think that liquid fence did work somewhat, but it doesn't last as long as I thought it would, and at $16 a bottle it is looking like it makes more sense to build a real fence around the garden. With guard towers and razor wire. Can you get land mines for rabbits?

More: Haha, we're a bit slow here. My tomato plants are still flowering and just producing fruit. Rob is already done.

Happy Independence Day

A little late, but better late than never. I hope you are having a great holiday weekend.

Sarah Palin Resigns

I'm not sure what to make of Sarah Palin's announcement today that she will not serve out her term as Governor of Alaska. The vast majority of the reactions I've read have been unfavorable to one degree or another, which doesn't exactly surprise me. My initial reaction, after WHAT?, was also unfavorable. But after reading a transcript of her remarks I think I'll take a more neutral stance for the moment. This may, in the long run, be the right thing for her to do for a couple of reasons.

I would have liked to see Palin get another year and a half of executive experience, but that may have proved more detrimental to her than anything else. Her enemies in both parties clearly see her as a threat and have continued to hammer away at her even now when the election has been over for eight months. Aside from frivolous, but expensive and time-consuming, ethics complaints, the nasty little bastards would spin anything that goes wrong in Alaska as her fault and credit anything that goes right to someone else. That happens to all politicians to some extent, but I think it happens to Sarah Palin to an extraordinary degree that someone like a Tim Pawlenty, for example, never gets. It is so extreme, I think, that it negates any benefits that Palin would accrue by finishing her term.

Palin also needs to spend some time building her political philosophy and national party credentials. Her detractors would never let her do that effectively as a sitting governor. If she would have attended and sat in on a large number of events or panels, they would caw that she wasn't fulfilling her duties as governor. If she didn't, they would caw that she was lazy or stupid. Now she can work on that with whatever level of initiative she wants, unconstrained by official duties.

Some right wing pundits have already written Palin off today in a knee-jerk fashion. I think that's a mistake. I also think that it's a mistake to assume that what she is doing is with 2012 in mind. My take is one of wait and see. I don't think Palin had the experience to be president last year, but then I thought the same thing about Barack Obama, and still do. And then there's Joe Biden, any reasonable person's third if you want to make that a three-way race...but I digress. I think Palin would do well to use the next few years to build credibility within her party to be a viable vice-presidential candidate in 2012, not presidential. Most important though, is not to build a candidacy, but a solid philosophical record that will make that candidacy a realistic option when the time is right for it. Now who else followed that path?

Huh, it's right on the tip of my tongue.

Why I'm A Climate Change Skeptic

Perhaps there is a good explanation for this, but if so I would like to hear it:

Over the coming days a curiously revealing event will be taking place in Copenhagen. Top of the agenda at a meeting of the Polar Bear Specialist Group (set up under the International Union for the Conservation of Nature/Species Survival Commission) will be the need to produce a suitably scary report on how polar bears are being threatened with extinction by man-made global warming.

This is one of a steady drizzle of events planned to stoke up alarm in the run-up to the UN's major conference on climate change in Copenhagen next December. But one of the world's leading experts on polar bears has been told to stay away from this week's meeting, specifically because his views on global warming do not accord with those of the rest of the group.

This is not an uncommon event. The government sanctioned panels that are quoted in the media now blatantly exclude and ignore dissenters to the point that I don't think they are scientific bodies at all anymore. They are more like a College of Cardinals from the Middle Ages, intent on enforcing doctrine rather than scientific inquiry. And so as the planet cools, contrary to every existing model about climate change, we get rhetoric about 6th warmest, 7th warmest, 8th warmest, instead of an acknowledgment that this year was cooler than last. The doctrine must be maintained!

Honest scientists are not afraid to have their theories challenged and confront contradictory evidence head on. Theologians, as history has proved, not so much. It's kind of a telltale as far as which one you are dealing with. I am willing to look at all of the evidence, I am not a "denier", an epithet that only a person of faith, not science, would hurl. The problem for me is not the observations that seem to support human caused climate change, but the way that the many contradictory observations are ignored or dismissed out of hand. That's not science, that's faith.

Or something even worse.

Shades of Jimmy Carter

There is the world as one might wish it to be, and the world as it is. A common and infuriating tactic that the left used during the cold war was to isolate US actions as deplorable while ignoring the actions of the Soviets that prompted those US actions in the first place. Context matters, and so some on the left do their best to ignore and obfuscate context so that an act can be seen in isolation, stripped of any rationale. Killing a man is a deplorable act. Killing a man who was about to kill others, not so much.

People here and around the world love to hate American influence and power. It was the great game of the last half of the 20th century and continues today. If only America wouldn't meddle here and there, the story goes, the world could regain its natural and peaceful state. Jimmy Carter seemed to subscribe to that belief and it appears that President Obama does as well. The results will probably not have much of an effect on the average American, at least in the short term, but they will be catastrophic to millions of people around the world who will be plunged into chaos and tyranny as the thugs of the world realize they have a free hand. Read the whole thing, but Spengler finishes a great essay with this:

Obama's continuing obsession with America's supposed misdeeds - deplorable but necessary actions in time of war - is consistent with his determination to erode America's influence in the most troubled parts of the world. By removing America as a referee, he will provoke more violence than the United States ever did. We are entering a very, very dangerous period as a result.

I don't think that Obama intends to create the misery that is coming, it's just that he has failed both to learn the lessons of history, and to understand that leadership is sometimes not choosing between good and bad, but between bad and less bad. Jimmy Carter failed because he could not bring himself to choose less bad, and so the bigger badness came to be. President Obama, in his arrogance, seems to be following in his footsteps. The real world is watching.

Cuts You Up

I find you in the morning
After dreams of distant signs
You pour yourself over me
Like the sun through the blinds
You lift me up and get me out
Keep me walking but never shout
"Hold the secret close", I hear you say

You know the way it throws about.
It takes you in and spits you out
It spits you out when you desire
to conquer it, to feel you're higher
To follow it you must be clean,
with mistakes that you do mean
Move the heart, switch the pace
Look for what seems out of place

On and on it goes
Calling like a distant wind
Through the zero hour we'll walk
We'll cut the thick and break the thin
No sound to break, no moment clear
When all the doubts are crystal clear
Crashing hard into the secret wind

You know the way it twists and turns
Changing color, spinning yarns
You know the way it leaves you dry
It cuts you up, and takes you high
You know the way it's painted gold
Is it honey? Is it cold?
You know the way it throws about.
It takes you in and spits you out

Oh, cuts you up
Oh, cuts you up
Oh, cuts you up
La, la, la...

You know the way it throws about.
It takes you in and spits you out
It spits you out when you desire
to conquer it, to feel you're higher
To follow it you must be clean,
with mistakes that you do mean
Move the heart, switch the pace
Look for what seems out of place

Oh, cuts you up
Oh, cuts you up
It's okay it goes this way.
The line it twists, it twists away
Cuts you up and spits you out
Keeps you walking, but never shout
La la la...

Peter Murphy-Deep

We Hit the Average High Today...

...for May 12th.

Damn nice sleeping weather though, and Sammy appreciates the break from the heat.

Senator Al Franken

I was going to say that I'm not angry about Franken being declared the winner of the US Senate race in Minnesota, but right off the bat he has seriously pissed me off. The SOB's press conference is preempting Jeopardy right now.

What a freaking asshole.

---

Ok, to be fair to old Al, he kept it short, so it was only a five minute loss of Jeopardy time. What I was going to write before was that the words "Senator Al Franken" do not seem as horrifying today as they did in early November. I'm still disappointed, but I think most of us were resigned to it ending up this way.

Politics aside, I think Franken is a nasty and boorish little man. I don't think he reflects the temperament of most Minnesotans, and that will become obvious after he takes his seat. That he garnered just barely over 50% of the vote in a year where Obama's coattail effect was so strong was telling I think. I'll bet he only has a hardcore base of about 30% and it won't take him long to start alienating the rest. My prediction: One-term wonder.

I suspect that Coleman did get the shaft in the way the recount was handled, but in any election of this scale(2.4 million votes) that comes down to 312 votes, the loser will always have a case for that. No system is going to be that perfect. I'm not sure what the solution is to close cases like this or even if there is a better one than what we have already. 

The cynic in me dryly notes though, that the biggest lesson from the whole recount drama is that when people say "every vote must be counted," what they really mean is "every vote must be counted until the result I want is reached."

Good Start to the Week

I got a pleasant surprise this morning when I walked out the door, something that has been a bit rare lately. Not that my life is terrible or anything, but things are pretty tight financially and there are a number of things that I want to do with the yard/property to spruce things up. The ones that just involve a little toil, I am doing. The ones that are going to cost some coin are stressing me a bit. A little background first.

Since my great personal and professional crash of 2005, something I haven't really shared much about here, I've been slowly trying to get back to the type of life I want and the kind of person I want to be. It has not been a smooth process; steps forward, steps backwards, and sometimes no steps at all. I've thought about what happened and had looked at it all as a "meltdown", but I think now that what Sheila describes in one of her posts as a "swerve" is more accurate:

There are many facets to life, and the point seems to be (to me) to figure out how to not recoil in ALL areas of your life, just because you have experienced a disappointment in ONE area. My friend David made me see, yesterday, that that is, in essence, what my script is about. Sometimes in life, we over-correct ourselves, after a bad rejection, professionally or personally. We take a huge swerve in the other direction and then have to go about undoing all the damage done by that swerve.

Yeah, I swerved. One of the things I recoiled from was taking care of the yard and property. I did enough to keep the city off my butt, but that was about it. The last couple of years I've been plugging away at things and I'm now at the point where I need to do stuff like redo the front steps/sidewalk. The steps at the front door are sagging away from the house and the step by the city sidewalk got wrecked by the city sidewalk plow, again, this year. The walk between the two is also starting to crack and slant and looks like crap. All in all, not good.

I had called the city earlier this year about their snowplow damaging my step and their response at the time was that the city has at least a 3" easement from the sidewalk and that since the step abutted the sidewalk, it was probably out of code. If that was the case, they would most likely hit me with a fix-it ticket, maybe to include the front walk since they would see that. Then I would have 30 days to get it all fixed, this time giving the city their easement. That meant tearing out the existing walk and fixing everything on my own dime. Not a disaster by any means, but cash is tough right now. One thing the city guy did say was that they would be redoing my street and sidewalks this summer and maybe he could talk to the project engineer about cutting me a deal, since they would be pouring concrete anyway. I said fair enough, but if the answer was no I didn't want someone hitting me with a fix-it ticket. I never heard back from the guy and just assumed the answer was no.

So anyway, I walked out the door this morning and a city employee was marking up not just the city sidewalk along the street, but my own front walk as well. We got to talking and it turns out that not only are they going to redo the step in front for me, they will do about 16' of my front walk, "to do it right". Hot dang.

But wait, it gets better. Since they are redoing the grade of the street and the sidewalk a little they will have to redo my driveway opening at the curb. The current driveway has a fairly steep angle to it, if it hits it too fast a small car could scrape its bumper. The city employee didn't like that. He figures he needs to regrade about 15' of my driveway to do that right, so they will pour new concrete for that too. It would leave me with a part concrete/part asphalt driveway, but is that a big deal?

And...The street reconstruction and the 180' of city sidewalk along my lot that will be replaced as part of the project? It's a state aid project for certain city arteries, I can't remember the term he used. Total property assessments for me: $0.

I'm going to talk to the contractor to see how much he would charge to do the remaining front walk and steps, since they will be there for the city work anyway. I don't really want to spend the money on that right now either, but if it's a good enough deal it makes sense.

God, that would be one more big thing off my plate. A good win.

more: After savoring this a little more, I think it's a good example of how treating people decently, even if I think I'm entitled to assume an angry and aggrieved pose, is better in the long run. Reaming on people is not my style, but in this case I had thought about it as a tactic to use to get something done. Aside from being generally wrong, here that would have been a huge mistake I think. It's not like I need a lot of reinforcement in this area, but it's a good reminder to first give people a chance.

Garden Update-Week 4

Bad news and good news.

The tomato plants are looking a little scrawny.
They continue to produce flowers, and now a handful of actual tomatoes have appeared.

The terrorist bunnies got to some of the corn shoots. I think I was a day or two late with the second application of Liquid Fence.
The rest are doing well and the ones that did get nibbled may come back. The pepper plant that got stripped bare and the cilantro have both come back. I don't know if the corn shoots that got hit will, but maybe. If they don't, I'll use the space for something else in the next two weeks.

The package on the radishes says 22 days to harvest. I don't think so.
They are doing fine, but I'm guessing two weeks behind.

The heavy rain last night just pounded the carrot tops flat.
The same thing happened to the radish plants earlier and they popped right back. We'll see what tomorrow brings.

Don't get me wrong, I'm pretty happy with the progress so far. I got the second round of beans, carrots, onions, and radishes in today. Directly below is a pic from today, and for comparison, below that is a reminder of how it looked four weeks ago when it was first planted.(click photos to enlarge)

Exactly Right

House Minority Leader John Boehner is not exactly my favorite politician in the world, but he was exactly right last evening when he answered Rep. Henry Waxman's attempt to shut him up with this:

"The gentleman's had his thirty years to put this bill together, and the house is going to spend a whopping five hours debating the most profound piece of legislation to come to this floor in a hundred years. And uh...and the chairman has the audacity to drop a three hundred plus page amendment in the hopper at 3:09 A.M. this morning. And so I would ask my colleagues, don't you think the American people expect us to understand what's in this bill before we vote on it?"

Real Clear Politics has the video.

Just 14 hours after dropping a 310 page amendment into an already far-reaching and massive bill, one that was issued  out of committee in "final" form only two days before, our House of Representatives approved it after a measly five hours of floor debate.

There is still hope that this boondoggle can be stopped in the US Senate. If you haven't been paying much attention to the issue, I urge you to start now. If you are wondering why, or if it even has an impact on you, stop and take a look around the room you are in. If this legislation is enacted, it is going to artificially raise the future cost of 80% or more of the energy used to produce, transport, and sell to you everything in that room. Ditto for everything in your refrigerator. That's just the raw cost of energy. Heaven knows what the costs will be from the thousands of regulations that will be issued because of this legislation.

I am not opposed to seeing the world move to non-carbon based energy. I am also not opposed to subsidizing basic research to try to make those energy sources cost effective replacements to burning coal, oil, or gas. What this bill does though, is coerce us into adopting conservation and energy production methods that are not cost effective now. If they were, the market would have embraced them already. We are going to pay billions for that in prices and taxes, billions that we might better spend on health care, education, and yes, a better standard of living for future generations.

Regardless of what one thinks about climate change, we ought to have the intelligence, decency, and just plain common sense to discuss exactly what we are doing here. That the Democratic leadership does not want that to happen, in fact is desperate to avoid it, should tell you everything you need to know.

A Seat On The Bridge Of The Titanic?

My geekdom has been completed with dsl. Now I can come home from work on a Friday evening, fire up C-SPAN, and watch the House of Representatives. Haha...I'm not sick, but I'm not well.

The Cap and Trade issue is hugely important. There will be other fights ahead even if the current bill passes the House this evening, but I think this is a historic moment. If it is stopped tonight, it will at least give Americans a chance to really absorb what this is all about. At 3:00 A.M. this morning, another 300 page amendment was added to a bill that had ballooned already just days ago. And yet Democrats are insisting on moving forward with just a few hours to comprehend the entire bill and debate it. The Democrat's process on this bill makes a mockery out of open democracy.

But with that, they will own it. They are deliberately introducing scarcity into the vast majority of energy production in this country. They aren't doing it directly, but by limiting the allowance of permits to emit the byproducts of energy production, primarily carbon dioxide. They will ramp down the amount permitted over time. Basic economics says that as you make something more scarce, it will become more expensive.

Looks like the vote is on.

Update: Passed. 219-212, with 8 Republicans voting for. Hall of Shame to come.

The Democrats have just gone all-in. They are now on a path that says they can dictate the use of energy in this country and what is worthy of that or not, and how much it costs. One can try to say that no, they are just dictating that non-carbon based energy should be used, but non-carbon based energy production is not even close to making up for the gap in what will be needed to grow the economy. The squeeze will be on, and it's going to hurt.

When your electricity bill jumps up, and you suffer electrical brownouts/blackouts, remember this moment.

When you decide not to take that weekend trip because you can't or don't want to spend the money on gasoline, remember this moment.

When you lose your job because the product you help make is now made overseas, remember this moment.

When you lose your job importing the products that are no longer affordable to make here, remember this moment.

When you can't afford the products that used to be made here, but are now only expensive imports, remember this moment.

When you lose your job because all of the others who used to buy your products or services can't afford them, remember this moment.

And as your children and grandchildren scrabble to make a living and only dream of the civilization and freedom you once enjoyed, remember this moment.

And what you did or did not do.

Update II: Serr8d has the Republican wing of the Hall of Shame.